I think I am going to start a blog again because, well, first of all, I am quite possibly a bit of an attention whore (but who isn't, really?). Second, and perhaps more importantly, I think I don't write as much as someone who has devoted her life to The Written Word ought to. Third, it has been impressed upon me lately that memory is an incredibly tenuous thing, and I'd like someday to have a record of what I'm thinking and feeling these days--and having a potential audience makes it more likely that I will continue to write.
Finally, it's summer, I don't yet have a job, and thus I actually have a little bit of free time.
I've been thinking lately about how my life and relationships with people seem to pass in distinct stages, broken up by work and school and places of living. In some ways, those things are artificial--I'm the same Elizabeth in San Luis Obispo as I was in Los Angeles, right?--but in truth I've come to believe they are more a part of me than I like to think sometimes. After all, what are you at any point but your answer to the question, "What's up with you, lately?"
The last few weeks, that question has been met with a bit of guilt on my part. "Well," I hedge, usually unsuccessfully, "I just finished teaching for a year"--here I push my glasses up my nose, or run my left hand through my hair, or shrug self-effacingly--"and I've got just one more quarter of classes to take before I've got my Master's." Then I nod and look away. I'm always nodding. I'm so awkward.
People generally respond, "Oh, that's great!" and I feel a bit deceitful. Is it really? More frequently, I'm plagued by the sense that my educational decisions have been financially imprudent. What am I going to do with all these loans and an MA in English? What am I qualified to do but teach or go on for a PhD? And once I have that PhD--five, six, seven years down the road, saddled with loans and such--then what?
I imagine myself, sometimes, thirty years old and finally superglued to the halls of academia, my heel-shod feet kicking, kicking, kicking. Maybe I'll have a family--a couple of kids who will be able by then to drag me down into the real world for a bit (changing diapers, tickling baby bellies, writing checks to a Montessori preschool)--but it could as possibly just be me, alone, in an increasingly insular existence ameliorated only by staff meetings and teaching.
I don't want that to happen.
